The organisers of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games have planned something special for Sunday August 8, when the flame will be extinguished in the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo during the closing ceremony and the handover is given to the French capital officially making it the next host city of the Summer Games. As the ceremony will be broadcast live back home (approximately 1 PM Paris time) to a live audience at the Trocadero opposite the Seine, a huge flag will be deployed on the Eiffel Tower.
Paris organisers say the flag would be the size of a football pitch and will be unfurled just about the same time Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris who is already in Tokyo right now, is given the Olympic flag by International Olympic Committee (IOC) chief Thomas Bach during the Tokyo 2020 closing ceremony.
The last time France hosted the Summer Games was in 1924, so this Sunday remains quite special to the organisers who had to wait an extra year for the handover ceremony to take place as the Tokyo Games were postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
A glimpse of what the flag would really be like was given during a warm-up exercise done in June.
"The excitement is very strong. We want to start with a world record. It's the biggest flag ever raised, ever. It's more or less the equivalent of a football field. So it's true that it will be big. It will be the first world record of Paris 2024 since it would be the biggest flag ever raised," Paris Games chief Tony Estanguet said during a press conference today.
As per the Guinness World Records, the largest flag flown measures 2,448.56 m² (26,356 ft² 13 in²), and was achieved by Trident Support Flagpoles and Sharjah Investment and Development Authority (both UAE) in Sharjah, UAE, on November 2, 2017. The attempt happened to show appreciation for the UAE during flag day.
The football field is usually around 70 x 100 m, or 7000 m², in size.
Also Read: Golfer Aditi raises a storm at Olympics as Tokyo prepares for a typhoon
